Opinion

• Opinion

  British Academic Boycott Is Just Blinkered Bigotry

  Later this month Britain’s largest university and college lecturers union will vote on a motion recommending its 67,000 members boycott their Israeli counterparts and Israeli academic institutions. The move by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education is only the latest in a series of high-profile anti-Israel declarations and boycotts to emanate…

  By Peter Kearney

  4 min read
• Letters

  Letter May 19, 2006

  Survivors Will Fight On The Forward has sunk to new depths by attacking Holocaust survivors who have objected to being treated like third-class citizens (“At Long Last, Have You No Shame,” May 12). Perhaps out of the continued naiveté that our views mattered, several survivors met yet again with Judge Edward Korman and Special Master…

  May 19, 2006 | 3 min read
• Letters

  Letter May 12, 2006

  Conservative Seminary Lacks Rabbinic Leader Opinion writer Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s comparison of Arnold Eisen, the newly appointed chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, to Solomon Schechter begs the question (“When a Scholar Became Chancellor,” May 5). Schechter possessed a profound understanding of Judaism in its rabbinic, theological formulation, as shown by his classic work, “Some…

  May 12, 2006 | 7 min read

Columnists View All

• Jodi Rudoren This is my last column as editor of the Forward

  

• Jay Michaelson American Jews were played — now what?

  

• Rob Eshman I have the answer to Jon Stewart’s toughest question about Israel

  

• Nora Berman ‘Eddington’ is full of conspiracy theories but it’s not about Jews. Or is it?

  

• Dan Perry Recognizing a Palestinian state is a great way to doom Palestinians

  

• Emily Tamkin Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear

  

The Latest

• Opinion

  At Long Last, Have You No Shame?

  Seven years after the signing of the historic Swiss bank settlement, in which the Swiss banking industry agreed to give back money looted from Holocaust victims’ bank accounts, a handful of Florida-based Holocaust survivors and their hangers-on have filed an appeal to the United States Supreme Court that could undermine the settlement and threaten the…

  May 12, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Conversion Is Not An Outreach Strategy

  For more than a decade, a group of Jewish communal leaders has been arguing that the challenge of intermarriage can only be met by a policy of converting non-Jewish partners. They cite statistics indicating that among children raised in interfaith families in which the non-Jewish partner has not converted, only a small minority identify as…

  By David Ellenson and Kerry Olitzky May 12, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  Can Peretz Conquer General Skepticism?

  How symbolic that Amir Peretz’s first act as Israeli defense minister was to approve an air strike that killed five Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. The dovish former labor union leader, turned instant hawk. His second act, though, was to begin lifting the most recent closure strangling the West Bank. More than any other job in…

  By Yossi Alpher May 12, 2006 | 5 min read
• Opinion

  Exploring the New Jewish Spiritualities

  What is spirituality? For some, the word connotes the fantasies of the New Age, from harmless notions like astrology to dangerous ones like apocalyptic messianism. For others, the word means precisely the opposite: not seeing the imaginary, but seeing the real more clearly, from the stirrings of the heart to the infinitesimal miracles of everyday…

  By Jay Michaelson May 12, 2006 | 5 min read
• Opinion

  March of Living Must Embrace Life

  Each year in April, thousands of Jewish youngsters from Israel and the Diaspora make a pilgrimage to the sites of the Nazi death camps in Poland, to commemorate the millions murdered, to remember and never to forget. The March of the Living has become one of the most important international Jewish events, a practical implementation…

  By Tad Taube May 5, 2006 | 4 min read
• Letters

  Letter May 5, 2006

  Hard Work Needed For A Good Job Anywhere I don’t know whether, as an April 28 article reports, more young Israelis have been leaving the country (“Israelis Park the Moving Truck and Head to the Mall”). All data are skewed, including the Israeli Democracy Institute’s finding that 7% of Israelis aged 15 to 18 do…

  May 5, 2006 | 5 min read
• Opinion

  When a Scholar Became Chancellor

  Who is Arnold Eisen? Few of my colleagues in the Conservative rabbinate have ever met this Stanford University professor, who was named last month to replace Ismar Schorsch as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The appointment is sure to shape the character of the premier American institution of Jewish studies and the…

  By Elliot Cosgrove May 5, 2006 | 4 min read
• Opinion

  It’s Not Just the Economy, Stupid

  At a international conference last month in Almaty, Kazakhstan, leading Russian political scientist Igor Panarin explained American policy toward Iran as follows: “Everybody knows that the real reason for American belligerence is not the Iranian nuclear program, but the June 2004 decision by the Tehran government to launch an Iranian oil bourse where oil will…

  By Eric Frey May 5, 2006 | 4 min read